Enhanced Usage Reports

I’m very pleased to announce the release of enhanced usage
reporting for Data8’s suite of data validation web services.

From today, you will be able to retrieve more customised,
detailed breakdowns of your usage to help identify systems that are either not
making full usage of our services, or are generating unexpectedly high request
volumes.

On top of the previous daily usage totals you will now be
able to separate out usage by:

End-user client name (for our reseller partners)

Authentication Type

Protocol Type

Referer Domain

API Key

IP Address

Application Name

We support a variety of methods to integrate with our
services, and the authentication type and protocol type details will help you
to identify areas where you may be using older technology and where an upgrade
may offer you a range of new options.

To access the new usage reports, log into your Data8
Dashboard and select the service you want to get the usage report for. You will
then see the following options immediately below the usage chart:

Select the time period you want to get the report for, tick
the boxes you want to break down your usage by, and click Download.

These additional data fields are only available from 14th
May 2019, any earlier days will only have a single entry with all these fields
being blank.

Authentication Type

The available authentication types are currently:

UserPass – using your Data8 username and
password to authenticate your requests is the simplest method, but also the
least flexible

ApiKeyOld – an older format of API Keys, only
usable for client-side Javascript requests, we recommend you generate a new API
key

ApiKey – a flexible method of authenticating
client- or server-side requests, with options for restricting access by domain
name, IP address, service and rate limiting

Anyone seeing the ApiKeyOld authentication type should
migrate to the ApiKey option simply by generating a new API Key and updating
their integration configuration with their new key.

If you see the UserPass authentication type, you can also
switch to the ApiKey method simply by generating a server-side key, then change
your integration configuration to use the username “apikey-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx”
(replacing xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx with your new API Key) and a blank password.

ADO – Requests made to the recordset.ashx
endpoint to load data into an ADO Recordset object, commonly from VB6 or
VBScript code

PROXY – Client-side Javascript requests made
using the loader.ashx script

HTTPPOST – REST requests made using HTTP POST
requests to the *.asmx endpoints

HTTPGET – REST requests made using HTTP GET
requests to the *.asmx endpoints

JSON – REST requests made using HTTP POST
request to the *.json endpoints

We would recommend clients migrating to the JSON endpoint in
most cases, as it provides the greatest flexibility for both client- and
server-side integrations, supports all the different authentication types and
has good support in all major development frameworks.

Referer Domain

If you are making client-side Javascript requests, this
option allows you to see how many requests are coming from which domain. This
doesn’t include the full URL, only the domain name. It does however
differentiate between subdomains, so “data-8.co.uk” and “www.data-8.co.uk”
would be listed separately.

API Key

You can generate as many API Keys as you like, and use
different keys to allow you to measure usage by different sites, applications,
users or any other metric that makes sense to you. Only new style API keys in
the format xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx will be listed here. If you are using an older
style API key, please generate a new one and update your integration
configuration to start taking advantage of all the improvements offered by the
new version.

IP Address

This lists the IP address that we receive the request from.
We do not record this for client-side Javascript requests, only for server-side
request. Each request can therefore either be separated out by either referrer
domain or IP address, but not both.

Application Name

This is a new flexible method of differentiating
usage by different applications under the same account. To start making use of
this, simply include an “ApplicationName” option in your requests. It is up to
you how you make use of this – it could be the name of the application that the
service is integrated with, or the name of the website, or a particular
functional area, or however you need to be able to measure your usage.